Climbing out of a $900M (pot)hole

The first step toward addressing the city’s nearly $900 million infrastructure backlog — those pothole-ridden streets that have become embarrassing fixtures of San Diego life — begins Monday with a new, comprehensive approach to the problem.

The City Council’s newly created Infrastructure Committee will hold its first meeting with the goal of developing a five-year plan for tackling the backlog, the first long-range plan for a city government with a history for putting short-term needs first with often disastrous long-term results. That plan may serve as the blueprint for a future ballot measure in 2014 or 2016 that asks voters for affirmation on the chosen direction or perhaps a tax increase to fund it.

Heading up the committee will be City Councilman Mark Kersey, a Republican businessman from Rancho Bernaardo who took office last month. He said the panel will move quickly on a three-step approach — streamline city operations to get projects from concept to completion in a more efficient way; develop a needs assessment for all of the city’s assets and get neighborhood input to prioritize projects; and, the most difficult task, find a way to pay for it all.

“We’ve neglected infrastructure for so long as a city, and part of that was due obviously to the fiscal disasters that we are facing, but now that we’ve got past some of those … we’re at least at a point where we can start looking at how we’re going to invest in the infrastructure of the city,” Kersey said. “Before we can address these problems and how we’re going to fix’em, we really need a clear diagnosis of what these problems even are.”

The last diagnosis came in February 2012 when city staff outlined $898 million in street, storm drain and building projects. But Kersey said that assessment didn’t include certain assets, such as the 5,000-plus miles of sidewalks in the city, so the actual price tag likely tops $1 billion.

The committee’s goal is to develop a five-year plan by the end of the calendar year after holding meetings in various neighborhoods to gather input. Then city leaders would tackle financing options next year.

Council President Todd Gloria kicked off the civic discussion over infrastructure during the Dec. 3 inauguration ceremony in which he boldly called for a ballot measure to address the problem. He has said it wouldn’t necessarily include a tax increase, but that’s the only scenario in which the city would be required to go before voters.

Gloria initially said he hoped to get it on the November 2014 ballot but now acknowledges that may not be possible given all the work that needs to be done between then and now, particularly when it comes to getting neighborhood input.

“I don’t think we should be in a position of going to the public without all of our ducks in a row and without a strong, deep consensus having been found,” he said. “If that takes four years, then that’s what we’ll do. The thing I can assure the public is that the problem will still be here four years from now if we don’t take any kind of aggressive action. It is my hope that, at a minimum, what we’ll have in place is a process that addresses infrastructure as efficiently as possible and that sets the stage for addressing the problem once and for all.”